Start a side project. <-- This is quite amusing and informative. There is a classic quote:

Naturally, the first thing I did was institutionalize Subversion.
(I've apparently always been a champion of source control, though I
didn't realize it until setting this story to paper.)
 
The second thing I did was start extracting the magic numbers into
configuration files.  At the time, it was a pretty common PHP idiom to
use .ini files for configuration.  Most of what you'd need was
supported, and I'm pretty sure PHP came with a library (aka a shotgun
blast of functions in the global namespace) that could understand .ini
files.

Haha! Man-o-man. So true. It is impossible to find any related functions. Anyway, we're getting namespaces in PHP6, wow, welcome to the 90s, man.